Why I'll skip Bush's State of the Union Address: I was talking with my doctor during last week's physical; he is a long-standing and successful physician in superrich Greenwich, Connecticut (rivaled only by the Bay Area, Aspen, and Honolulu as America's priciest place to live). He said, "The minimum wage needs to be doubled immediately. I'm starting to think we're looking at civil war."
The self-caricaturing, supremely arrogant Republican political leadership says that if you mention the U.S.'s skyrocketing inequality in the distribution of wealth, you're trying to stir class warfare. Actually, as Molly Ivins has written, class warfare is already raging, and the GOP started it: Thirty-eight percent of last April's tax cut went to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans.
Ninety-two percent of the "economic stimulus" — excuse me, "economic security" package that Republicans paint Tom Daschle as an "obstructionist" and villain comparable to Saddam for failing to rubber-stamp — goes to giant corporations, with tax breaks on a scale that citizens in focus groups literally refused to believe, thought the people describing the bill were joking, and that the archconservative Wall Street Journal said "mainly padded corporate bottom lines": $115 billion in permanent, unconditional tax breaks to large companies and CEOs, including $16 billion in retroactive alternative minimum tax refunds to huge corporations.
That includes, of course, a $254 million check for Enron, which paid zero taxes in four of the last five years, but is a bipartisan scandal because 28 percent of its flood of campaign contributions went to Democrats. Cheney and Bush are fighting as fiercely as Special Forces soldiers against disclosing the energy industry's dictation of the administration's energy plan, though it's already leaked out that Ken Lay told Federal Energy Regulatory Commission chairman Curtis Hebert that his pal the President would fire him unless Hebert agreed to the deregulations Lay wanted; Hebert refused, and Bush replaced him with an Enron ally. Newsweek has also reported that energy policy formulation began with meetings where gas, oil, and nuclear execs were literally invited to draw up a wish list, though repealing the Endangered Species Act was deemed too controversial.
To be sure, Republican Dick Armey has blasted critics who doubt that corporate boons create jobs — says the stimulus package will create 170,000 jobs next year. That'll fix 0.13 percent of our current unemployment, offset the 140,000 the airlines laid off despite Congress' $15 billion handout. Maybe Armey hasn't seen the American Express commercials noting that 99 percent of America's businesses are small businesses.
Success and wealth are not evil; my wife and I may be church mice by our Greenwich neighbors' standards but are very well off by anyone else's. And the income (adjusted for inflation) of families in the middle of America's earning scale rose 9 percent (from $41,400 to $45,100) between 1979 and 1997. But the income of families in the top 1 percent rose 140 percent, from $420,200 to $1,016,000, and the gap grows wider every day.
Nor is conservatism evil or wrong; it's only common sense to say that intrusive government shouldn't be the first solution offered for every problem (which is why it's so hard to fathom psycho puritan John Ashcroft and his cronies' Talibanic zeal to legislate personal lives and drape classical statues). These days I even find myself thinking more favorably of Ronald Reagan, except for James Watt and that whole deliberate trampling-the-Constitution Iran-Contra thing; Reagan genuinely had ideas about smaller government; he was shallow, but Dubya is a dry gulch. My parents were Republicans, before the GOP took the moral dive traced by the three Bush generations — from Prescott Bush hard right to George H.W. Bush, then beyond the furthest far right and off the scale of political discourse with George W.
But precisely because I believe companies should strive to make profits for their shareholders, I believe you can't merely trust companies not to pollute or not to give their workers the shaft — it's human nature that they'll pick profit over virtue. And to see a President and party that so radically skew our political tradition; that so blatantly, unabashedly, publicly not only allow but encourage corporations to go ever further in polluting and shafting; makes me think things have gotten out of hand and that my doctor just might be right. Or, as consummate capitalist and multibillionaire Warren Buffett said during last year's debate about the estate tax (GOP PR spin: "death tax") that affects nobody but the richest 2 percent, "We are on the way to becoming a plutocracy. That is not just wrong. It is destabilizing."
9:43:24 PM 
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